AT least 135,000 or 27 per cent of JPS customers received electricity bills in November that varied by as much as 80 per cent, both higher and lower, from their normal readings, the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) said yesterday.

“That is an unusually high number of customers that were kicked-out,” said David Geddes, the OUR’s consumer and public affairs manager.

JPS (Jamaica Public Service), the monopoly light and power supplier, has had, in recent weeks, to fend off angry consumer complaints of exorbitant bills, forcing the OUR to launch an investigation into the matter.

The OUR received about 1,000 formal complaints on the issue.

The investigation is ongoing and the JPS has asked for more time, until mid-January, to prepare a report for the apparent anomalies in its bills since Hurricane Ivan in September, and especially last month.

Geddes told the Observer that the JPS computer system had red-flagged more than a quarter of the company’s November bills, which had gone above 80 per cent wide of the mark, compared to previous readings.

“The OUR understands that of the 135,000 bills that were spit out for verification, 70 per cent of that number received low bills and 30 per cent received high bills,” said Geddes.

It was not immediately clear why the 80 per cent threshold for the red-flagging of bills was used, rather than the 65 per cent benchmark that was the previous norm.

At the 65 per cent trigger, far more bills, with either higher or lower costs, would have been red-flagged for querying, analysts said.

The OUR, according to Geddes, had no way to “estimate what the figure would have been at 65 per cent”.

The information that is to be delivered by JPS to the OUR about the wide fluctuation in its billing to more than a quarter of its customers, will signal to the regulator whether there was a problem of irregular consumption or a billing error.

On Saturday, the JPS opened some of its customer service offices to answer consumer complaints about their bills, and its representatives mostly told customers either that their most recent bills represented actual, as against estimated, meter readings in the post-hurricane period.

High bills were also explained as a function of some customers wrongly receiving rebates for their post-hurricane loss of power – although their electricity was returned early – and that this now had to be paid back.

Most of the customers interviewed on Saturday were not assuaged by the explanations.

Apart from the fuller analysis that the JPS has promised the OUR by January 11, the company, a subsidiary of the US firm Mirant Corporation, is to deliver by tomorrow a report on 32 customers who were picked out by the regulators from the complainants because their November bills had risen by as much as 500 per cent.

But in one of the cases heard by JPS reps at their offices at Parade in downtown Kingston, Hensley Thompson’s bill had risen tenfold, to $30,000.

JPS customers can, in the meanwhile expect, high light bills this month.

“I would certainly expect that the public discontent would continue through the December billing,” J Paul Morgan, the director-general of the OUR said at a press conference in Kingston yesterday. “The December bills are going to come out really high because the estimated bill is based on an average of the previous two actual readings. If the last reading, which was the November bill, is high, it is going to influence the estimate going forward. Therefore, customers who had high bills in November. would see a high bill (in December).”

– Additional reporting by Petre Williams